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A note on Platter wines rating less than four stars

I had a query from one of the handful of people who’ve seen Platter’s 2015 already – someone rather puzzled by what at first glance looks like a rather haphazard way of dealing with wines scoring less than four stars.

Unlike previously, many of them have no words at all – just a star rating. But some of them do have brief descriptions! Huh? I agree it does look rather odd, but there is some system to it. This is it, as I understand it:

The default position is that all wines scoring less than 4 stars get only a rating. (This was a space-saving mechanism, basically, as the total number of wines kept on rising and the number of pages available didn’t.) But in practice it looked very strange and unpleasing on some pages where such wines were in the great majority – so, in each range, at least one of such wines is given a short note as well as the rating (not according to any particular system that I’m aware of). The remainder of the lower-scoring wines are listed after the rubric “Also tasted:”, with just the name of the wine and the score.

Also, however, any NEW wine, tasted and rated for the first time in the guide, is also given a note, even if it scores 3.5 stars or less.

That’s it, I think. See? It’s quite simple, really. Isn’t it…?

You’ll also notice that there is no longer red ink used for wines scoring four stars or above. This change has no arcane significance. It helps Diners Club save money.

Incidentally, my understanding is that the online version of Platter will carry notes for ALL the wines.